Tonight is the 90th Acadamy Awards and this seems an appropriate cartoon for the occasion. Batman has been played by many actors over the years but here we are finally given a glimpse of the toll that how being inhabited by so many personalities has taken on him.

But at least his personalities behave more-or-less the same and are therefore more predictable. Most people with multiple personality disorder have to deal with vastly different types of personalities that pull them in drastically different directions: male, female, adult, child, honest, criminal, peaceful, violent, mensch, hell raiser, etc. I learned all of this from a TV series that used to be on Showtime called United States of Tara, and TV wouldn’t lie.

Before we check out what Wayno was up to this week, here are a couple bits of hate mail I received this week that I thought you might find entertaining.

I posted the following cartoon on FB and Instagram on “Throwback Thursday,” which is one of those meaningless hashtags that gives people an excuse to spend more time on the Internet instead of living their actual lives.

It was a popular post by Bizarro standards and the vast majority of people understood what I was getting at and left positive responses. I got a quite a few comments like this one, however:

“You know depression is an actual mental disorder that doesn’t fucking show up from technology and doesn’t go away if you go back to nature or some shit but yeah just say this garbage. Antidepressants can be abused but for some people they’re the best method of treatment.”

My response: “I have been chronically depressed since I was 18 years old and spent over 19 years on antidepressants. Humor is one of the things that keeps people like me from jumping off a bridge. I’ve found that laughing at yourself is much more beneficial than crying victim.”

Not the perfect response, granted, but my point is that having a sense of humor about your problems goes a lot further than screaming that you’re a victim every time someone says or does something that doesn’t perfectly validate your worldview. Plus, the cartoon is not saying “technology” per se is the problem. It’s the unnatural mess we’ve made of the modern world that these explorers are exposing the jungle inhabitant to and that’s enough to depress anyone.

On a side note, researchers are finding that excessive time spent with electronic devices at the expense of human interaction decrease one’s sense of happiness. Researchers have also found that time spent in nature increases one’s serotonin. I have personally found these things to be true for me. So, yes, technology is part of the problem after all.

Another bit of hate mail came in from an old FB post of the following cartoon.

The comment I refer to was this: “By all means, let’s let them rape and behead us, and then make sure to thank them. Because we wouldn’t want to hassle them. For fucksake ” (lack of punctuation is his)

My response: “You make a lot of sense. If you’ll let me know your ethnicity and your religious beliefs, I’ll be happy to persecute you based on crimes committed by people of a similar background. ‘For fucksake,’ of course.”

I don’t need to explain this to people capable of understanding it. As long as there are fear-based bigots in the world and folks like the Russians and Fox News Channel to feed them fake news about how we need big guns and authoritarian daddy figures to protect us, this problem will not go away.

Now let’s see what Wayno was up to this week…

Russians who are engaged in activities other than swaying American elections to favor the Kremlin are always funny.

By the way, Wayno assured me that this parking attendant is wearing woolen tights and a flannel dance belt because the weather in Moscow can turn a ballerino into a ballerina alarmingly quickly. On his blog post this week, he includes a rough sketch of this cartoon and some info about where he originally wanted to go with it but didn’t and why. A link to his blog is at the bottom of this post.

This is one of the very few situations in which you can pay a relative stranger to insert their finger into your rectum without breaking any laws. “He told me he was an internist, officer. Honest!”

We submitted this cartoon many weeks ago, long before the latest school massacre in Florida, but it became an accidentally timely comic considering the heroic protests that teenagers all over America have been engaged in against the irrational and fearful proponents of nearly unregulated gun sales. Let’s call the cowards in the NRA what they are: scaredy cats with masculinity issues. And let’s call the politicians in their pockets what they are: greedy assholes who care more about power and money than keeping their countrymen safe. (Of course, that also perfectly describes the Cheeto in Chief so I don’t expect meaningful changes anytime soon.)

More importantly, why is the U.S. the only country where this routinely happens? Until we answer this question, even gun control won’t stop it.

I carry my own blood everywhere I go in my handy, portable, temperature-controlled blood bag. I call it my body.

If flies played teeny-tiny tennis on my food preparation surfaces, I might let them stay. But since they don’t, I just kill them. I don’t kill everything that touches my food preparation surfaces, but it’s better to ask first just to be on the safe side.

This is the second time in ten days that Waldo has appeared in Bizarro and on Wayno’s blog post this week he discusses the behind-the-scenes-professional-cartoonist insider info that explains how that happened. The link to his blog post for this week is below.

Thanks so much for joining us this week, Jazz Pickles! Please check out a few of the links below that help support our cartooning efforts. We at Rancho Bizarro will toast you with one of our hourly, ceremonial tequila shots.

Until next week––be happy, be smart, be nice, and resist ignorance and fascism.

When I was growing up in the late 1900s, my parents didn’t believe in spending the extra money to get the name-brand fashion trends my sisters and I needed if we hoped to have any social traction at school. This taught us important lessons such as: Kids in Levis® and Dingo® boots are not always kind to kids in Montgomery Ward jeans and “Dango” boots from Larry’s shoe barn. In the cartoon above, it’s no mystery which style of balloon hat I would have been wearing around the park.

We’ve come to take gavels in courtrooms for granted but as I was drawing this cartoon, I began to wonder about the history behind it. One could argue that a courtroom is perhaps the one social situation in which it is essential that even the most unruly of persons needs to summon the self-discipline to behave in a civilized manner. If you say or do the wrong thing, you could literally get your ass thrown in jail just for not following the rules of the room. And yet, for gavels to have become standard tools of the trade there must have been enough times that a courtroom got crazy enough that judges needed to bang a hammer on a table to get people’s attention and settle them down. I think this is a testament to the fact that for all our high and mighty opinions of ourselves, when things aren’t going our way we’re little better than a pack of coyotes.

On the positive side, I’m happy that courts have kept the traditional method of calling order to the room instead of using more modern technology like an air horn or a Supersoaker.

I’ll admit this Batman joke may not be the cleverest cartoon I have ever published. But something about a couple of Civil War-era crime fighters trotting out of their secret hideaway cave on a horse amused me so here we are. Also, the word “bathorse” is funny because your brain wants to pronounce the “th” like a “th,” but that would make it an “orse” you use in the bath.

I’m the kind of guy who does not carry a purse, so I like a lot of pockets. The downside of a multi-pocketed ensemble, however, is that I find myself constantly searching for various accoutrements like my keys, wallet, cell phone, handkerchief, lip balm, back scratcher, piñata bat, linoleum knife, surgical adhesive, etc. The creepy man in the cartoon above has found a solution for his own dilemma, but I carry far more things than does he so I must keep searching.

On a side note, I tried carrying a purse for a couple of years but I kept leaving it places. I got tired of having to replace my I.D. and cell phone and was spending a fortune on surgical adhesive so I gave it up.

I’ve always been an avid dog lover and have taught several to drive. The worst driver among them was a rescued pit bull who was too emotionally sensitive to deal with drivers who were a bit aggressive. If she got cut off in traffic, she would whimper and climb into the back seat, forcing me to grab the wheel to avoid an accident. Virtually all of the dogs I’ve driven with have the problem of circling several times before parking and some stop regularly to sniff the tailpipes of other cars, which can be frustrating if you’re in a hurry. I’ve since given up letting my dogs drive.

I tried for a while to teach my cats to drive but they are utterly uninterested in it unless you can convince them that driving is the one thing you absolutely do not want them to do.

If you’re one of those people who buy gifts and/or support the arts, please consider some of these fine products:

This cartoon was a collaboration with my good friend, Cliff Harris The King Of Wordplay. Almost everyone attempts puns and wordplay but it is my experience that very few people can come up with ones that are truly surprising and therefore laugh-inducing. Cliff is a master. Here are a couple of my faves of Cliff’s from over the years…Chinese Restaurant and Pick Up Line. Cliff wrote a very fun book of dirty wordplay which would make a lovely gift and which you can buy on Amazon if you have money left over after buying some of my stuff.

Here’s a fun, last thing: Some of my favorite family members came down to Mexico for Day of the Dead this year. We all decked out and haunted the streets of our town in grand fashion, along with thousands of other folks in what is a city-wide party that lasts for days. MUCH fun was had. From left to right: Me, Krelspeth, Cornelius Red, Krapuzar, Olive Oyl. (Amazing Photo by Krapuzar’s husband, Don Gooch.)

I’ve done a lot of cartoons about superheroes but they never possess the qualities that I loved about them as a kid: power, intelligence, strength, coolness, etc. Somehow, I find it much more enjoyable to poke fun at them than to draw comics that glorify them as heroes.

I’ve done so many superhero cartoons that a few years ago I published an entire book of my superhero satires, which you can buy here. You may be surprised to learn––as I was when I put that book together––that the word “superhero” is actually trademarked or something, which is why I had to name the book “Bizarro Heroes,” instead of “superheroes”. I was not happy about that but there really is no adequate substitute word.

Incidentally, people often ask me what the joke in the title panel means (first picture, above) and here’s the deal; the title panel appears next to my comic in the Sunday color comics supplement of some markets. It’s really only meant to be a title box that tells you what cartoon you’re about to read. Here’s an example from “Zits”. It can be a joke, but it doesn’t have to be. So sometimes I just create a fun picture, and sometimes I use a piece of an old cartoon which may have a little joke to it. Here’s the old Bizarro that today’s title panel came from.

This cartoon was inspired by my hatred of the way airlines do business. Just recently, Olive Oyl went back to the U.S. for a week and filled up a suitcase with some stuff we can’t get here in Mexico. The suitcase weighed 76 lbs. and they charged her $220 to check it, which is almost enough to buy it a seat in the passenger compartment. If she’d divided it into two smaller suitcases, it would have been the same amount of weight and taken up even more room in the cargo compartment, but they would have charged her less than half that amount to check it. Sure, makes perfect sense.

Lately, I’ve been having a lot of fun exploring some pretty surreal premises like this one about chicken legs. If you like this kind of humor, spray champagne over each other championship-locker-room-style because there are quite a few more heading your way in the coming weeks.

Some conservative type harrassed me on social media regarding this cartoon by saying something about liberals not being able to be trusted to bring fetuses to full term so blah blah blah, something stupid. I responded by observing that conservatives are obsessed with bringing unwanted children to term but then insist on completely abandoning them once they’re born. No help for poor or middle-class folks with birth control, no help with abortion, no help feeding, housing, or educating the child, no help providing them with healthcare which only the very wealthy can afford, etc. Historically and statistically, when you remove both birth control and abortion services for the not-wealthy, you get a big spike in crime 15 years later. Somehow, Republicans of this sort just can’t imagine how those two things could be connected.

Yes, this cartoon caused a shitstorm on social media, but I knew it would. I don’t read 99% of the negative comments on my social media so whatever they said about me didn’t stick.

One thing a lot of people mentioned was that this story about GW and the cherry tree is mythology in the first place and therefore an early example of fake news. That’s true––although it was written after Washington’s death and so it was more a case of hero worship after the fact as opposed to an attempt to change people’s perception of a given politician during his career, as fake news is used today–– but regardless, I still don’t see how that fact is relevant to this cartoon. I sense that most people who mentioned this were just proud of themselves for knowing it isn’t a true story.

Other people pointed out that the Founding Fathers were similar in many ways to racists of today because they owned slaves, counted black men as three-fifths of a person in the Constitution, etc. and they are correct. I still think if the Founding Fathers could see Trump in today’s context, most would dig their way out of their graves and slap the crap out of every American who voted for him.

Another person asked about the different font in the balloon, which is a legitimate question. I did that to be sure the reader knew it was a tweet, and not a voice speaking through his cell phone, or whatever.

I’ll admit I’m very proud of this cartoon. It satirizes the Cheeto Mussolini and his spoiled-rich-brat style of communication about any journalism that doesn’t directly serve or flatter him, and the “ALT” aspect of the caption box calls to mind his affiliation with the “alt-right movement,” which is a sanitized name for racists and anti-semites. I don’t think any of us should stop talking about the fact that we have a Nazi-sympathizing, racist, misogynist, lying, sexual predator in the White House until he and his kind are gone. That may take a good, long time, but let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope for a miracle.

This cartoon has a fundamental error in that Spongebob actually lives underwater and his clothes fit him fine in that state. So if he ventured onto dry land, as he dried out his clothes would become too large and fall off of him. I didn’t do the cartoon that way because who wants to see his tiny, dry, square penis? Not me.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s funnies, Jazz Pickles. If you’d like to feel the deep sense of satisfaction that comes from supporting the art and ideas that you enjoy, please consider one of the ways below that you can help keep the lights on here at Rancho Bizarro. THERE ARE SOME HOLIDAYS COMING UP AND SOME OF THE STUFF LISTED BELOW WOULD MAKE TERRIFIC GIFTS!

Stonehenge is one of those things that, by nature of its mystery, has been the subject of innumerable cartoons. I’ve done quite a few myself. Here’s one that springs to mind. And here’s another that is partly about Stonehenge.

It is said that Stonehenge was the inspiration for the modern-day building block toys called Legos. If that is true, I wonder if a majority of giants in the days of Stonehenge had henge-shaped bruises on the soles of their feet, as modern parents do now with Legos.

One might also wonder about the biological logistics of a woman the size of the one in this cartoon carrying and giving birth to a child that size. I will have to leave that to the experts, however, as I am not well versed in the field of gynecology.

I have found that mere words are not sufficient to express the embarrassment and horror that I feel for my country of birth regarding the adolescent, egomaniacal buffoon who has been allowed to occupy the Oval Office this year, so I drew a cartoon about it. Each time I do this, one or more readers chastise me for sticking my nose into politics and I have to remind them that they are confusing the United States with one of the very many countries where free speech is not encouraged or allowed. Like Russia. Which also happens to be the buffoon’s favorite country, which explains their confusion to some degree, I suppose.

I like food but I’m not what you’d call a “foodie,” so the enormous popularity of cooking shows, food channels, etc. has mystified me a bit. In fact, the kind of obsession America has with food-based television seems very similar to that of pornography, although that’s primarily a male thing. I contend that my relating the two makes sense since eating and mating are two of our top biological imperatives. Accordingly, it can’t be long before there are dozens of TV shows and cable networks dedicated to breathing. “This week on OxygenHigh, we compare the taste and smell of air on the crowded streets of Singapore with that of the air surrounding a corral full of llamas in the Andes.”

I have had discussions with intelligent people about whether health care should be a “right” or a “privilege” and I’ve heard intelligent people argue from both sides. If you fall on the “privilege” side of the equation and do not believe governments should provide health care for their citizens, I ask you to consider these scenarios: Your house is on fire and you call 911, only to be asked for your fire insurance policy number. If you don’t have the right insurance, the firetruck doesn’t leave the station and you’re tasked with putting the fire out yourself. That would routinely result in the loss of almost everything you’ve built over the years, with no way to get it back.

Or someone is breaking into your house and you call the cops. Same thing; you can’t afford police insurance, so no one shows up. I guess you should have thought of that when you got a job that doesn’t provide adequate fire and police insurance. Why should the rest of us pay for your ignorance and laziness?

I’m known to be a hard-working, intelligent guy who has made a name for himself in the world of art and creativity. It wasn’t easy, believe me, and though I’ve made enough money along the way to keep myself and my family eating regularly and living indoors, I’ve had a very hard time over the years affording health insurance. I insured my children when they lived at home but went for more than a dozen years without it myself, in fact, and only managed to get a bare-bones policy just three years ago. I assure you I am neither poor, nor lazy, and there are millions of Americans in the same boat as I’ve been. Had I gotten seriously ill or injured in those years, it would have ruined me or I would have died.

Is this the kind of community you want to live in? To my mind, communities are where humans agree to live together because we are pack animals and therefore stronger together than individually. When the community gets large enough, some of us get together to form a government whose job it is to protect the community and make sure everyone works alongside each other amicably for the common good, and gets the help they need when they’re, sick, disabled, victimized or disadvantaged in a way that makes them unable to participate in the community as well as they might otherwise. When someone in a small village is disabled or sick, do we simply drop them off out in the forest because they are no longer of use to the rest of us?

I’d like Americans to ask themselves why fire and police protection are a right but health protection is a privilege.

Along those lines, there are Americans who believe that Bernie Sander’s idea to offer a free college education to every citizen is nothing more than a “handout”. Again, what if you brought your kid to the local elementary school for first grade but were turned away because you couldn’t afford to send them to school? How is your child going to compete in the workforce with those who are getting a proper education? What opportunities will their future hold with this kind of disadvantage? Does it not improve the society as a whole to have an educated workforce? Don’t we all benefit when we live among educated people? We know from history that a lack of education increases the crime rate, so perhaps if we all pitch in a few bucks to offer education and healthcare to everyone, we’d have a more civil society. Sure, a statistically minuscule percentage of citizens would be slightly less filthy rich, but I can live with that.

This cartoon about drugs got a metric shitload of attention on the Interwebs. A few people waxed fearful about what would happen if pot was legalized, but most people agreed that it is high time (pun intended) that the United States AS A COUNTRY, NOT JUST INDIVIDUAL STATES, pull its head out of its ass and realize that cannabis has tremendous health benefits and is not a fraction as dangerous as many of the pharmaceuticals we’re being sold. It is also a much safer and less damaging form of recreation than is tobacco or alcohol.

In my judgment, pot is still illegal for two reasons:

Most Americans have been steeped in scary pot propaganda for their entire lives and even if they’ve smoked it (as most have) and know first-hand how harmless it is, they still believe that at least some of the terrifying nonsense they’ve heard must be true. So many of them vote against legalizing it apparently believing that they could handle it, but others cannot.

There are a handful of people are making billions selling drugs that marijuana could replace very cheaply, and those people control politicians by throwing money at them.

In closing, the Lord of the Rings character who is currently the Attorney General of the United States, Jeff Sessions, has said things about marijuana that show him to be either mentally disabled or the complete butt bitch of the pharmaceutical industry. I’m guessing both things are true.

I think if cops tried this, they’d be surprised how often it works.

In my youth I worked in the advertising world and have seen food stylists work in person. It’s kind of amazing that this is a job, but of course perfect-looking food sells better than something slapped together by the teenager who works in the actual kitchens of restaurants, so great attention is paid to this in photos. Behind likely every commercial photo of food you’ve ever seen, someone (and their assistant[s]) spent a lot of time placing each element of a dish carefully into place, often using tweezers and manicure scissors, discarding large amounts of food because it wasn’t exactly the right color, shape, size, or texture to be part of the “perfect” meal. With what is thrown away during a photo session for a single sandwich, you could feed three meals to a family of four. And that family of four is likely underinsured and won’t have nearly enough money to send their kids to college. But at least they won’t be relying on government handouts once the Cheeto Mussolini takes their Medicaid away to provide tax cuts for the extremely wealthy, who clearly deserve every advantage government can give them.

Thanks for dropping by for this informal, imaginary, one-sided chat Jazz Pickles. You mean more to me than you’d be comfortable hearing me tell you. If you enjoy the content I provide for you here for free, please consider the following options.

As most regular readers of my blog and cartoons in general know, syndicated newspaper cartoons are submitted to our distributors (King Features in my case) four-to-six weeks ahead of publication. So when I wrote and drew this Batman-meets-vampire comic, I had no idea it would appear in newspapers worldwide the day after Adam West died. He was a talented actor who is most known for playing Batman in the 1960s “Batman” TV show. I was eight years old when the show first aired and it was instantly my favorite. Batman was my favorite super hero and my toys were as dominated by Batman as a 1980s kid’s were by Star Wars. (The photo beneath the “Bat Trash” link above is of one of them.)

The various Hollywood versions of Batman over the years have been entertaining and he’s certainly a lot “cooler” now than he was in the 60s TV show, but Adam West will always be Batman to me. He and the show embodied a kind of tongue-in-cheek corny-cool that you don’t find much anymore, and Adam West’s Batman is the one I use most often in my Batman cartoons, of which I’ve had many in the past 32 years.

A Bizarro reader sent me this message yesterday on FacadeBook:

“You may remember an e-mail I sent you many years ago in which I told you that “Adam West LOVED your cartoon!” He was a guest at a comics/toy convention in Plano, TX and I got his autograph. I gave him a photocopy of one of your Bizarro cartoons, which showed Batman in the days of the Old West…Adam West laughed out loud when he saw this, and he showed it to his costars Julie Newmar and Yvonne Craig. They loved it, too.”

Thanks for reminding me of this story, Matt. I’ve had the pleasure over the years of being email pals with Julie Newmar who played Catwoman on the same show and was my first Hollywood crush. She’s a real sweetheart.

Here are a few of my favorites over the years.

This one was particularly fun to execute because I’m a fan of Grant Wood.

I’ve had a LOT of fun over the years fooling around with their costumes, as the ones above and below show.

And this one was chosen for the cover of my book of Bizarro cartoons about super heroes. I was required to change their costumes for legal reasons. According to the publisher’s lawyers, you can get away with borrowing other people’s characters for satire in a given comic, but you can’t put them on the cover.

And back to today’s Sunday comic which is the first large one posted above, I’ve personally never seen a comic that explored the relationship between vampires and Batman so I smiled like The Joker when I came up with this one. Hope you like it.

I encourage you to share your own Batman memories in the comments section. Rest in peace, caped crusader!

And now we move onto the week’s cartoons:

Here’s another vampire gag but of an entirely different ilk. It might be cool to have a vampire as a dad but if he had to go around dressed like this in the daytime, not so much. (Side note: If anybody launches a “Vampire Dad” TV show or series of young adult books in the next twelve months, I’m going to sue.)

Here’s a little twist on a phrase a lot of people have heard from their mothers. I thought it might be funny if a housekeeper said it––I hope I was right. I used to live with someone who was as messy as the guy in this cartoon and I wanted to say something like this to her on more than one occasion. Eventually I said this and more. Now we don’t speak.

I admit I’m not a fan of what people nowadays call “man buns,” but as a person who enjoys dressing a little eccentrically from time to time, I shouldn’t criticize. Well, a little gentle cartoon fun is fair game though, right?

About a month ago a doctor was beaten up and dragged off a plane because he did not volunteer when United Airlines asked some people to get off a flight so a few of their crew members could go somewhere to make other flights. He had chosen that flight and paid for a seat because he needed to open his office the next morning to see his patients, but those weren’t enough reasons for United Airlines to honor their commitment to a customer. The way the world works these days it’s very difficult to live without using commercial airlines and they know it, so don’t expect this kind of thing to change anytime soon. Or ever.

On a lighter note, a few people wrote to say they enjoyed seeing Olive Oyl in the restaurant background. If you didn’t know, she’s the newest of my Bizarro Secret Symbols.

I asked myself to write a joke about “baby boomers” and this happened. I expected to get at least one piece of hate mail about publishing a cartoon that depicts baby violence but thus far I have been disappointed.

I did yoga regularly for a few years and got some good from it but I have to admit that in the end I found it unbearably boring. I know it is supposed to be meditative and I like meditation, but I found it difficult to get much of my “om” on while the teacher was talking.

That’s the way the pie crumbles this week, Jazz Pickles. Thanks for joining me. Until next time, be happy, be smart, be nice.

If you’ve ever attended a party with a romantic partner, you’ve had a moment like this. One of you objects to the way the other was behaving at the party and it leads to a late night argument. Often it is about jealousy but sometimes it’s about something one of you said that was perhaps a bit too honest for polite company. I’ve been on both sides of this equation so when I thought of this scenario between Batman and Robin, I got a chuckle out of it, but more importantly, I sympathized with both of them. Batman just thought he was being funny and didn’t know he was embarrassing Robin, Robin felt forced to politely play along with his partner’s pathetic pandering for laughs. I’m not the first to suggest the ambiguously gay relationship between the two. The comic books themselves had many unusual moments between them, like these two, and then humorists over the years have taken the ball and run with it. (pun half intended)

Olive Oyl and I watch Jeopardy every weeknight for three reasons: 1) So that we can feel smart when we answer questions correctly 2) So we can learn new things 3) For the innate humor in watching Alex Trebek try to navigate the impossible task of interviewing socially awkward people about utterly uninteresting details of their lives. Alex: I understand you asked your wife to marry you in an interesting way. Contestant: Yes, I, um, wrote “will you marry me” on a watermelon and then I, um, waited for her to find it in the refrigerator. Alex: Good for you.

The Zika virus potentially using this year’s Summer Olympics as a vehicle to more quickly spread to every country around the globe (other than Russia whose team was banned for doping) inspired this cartoon.

I enjoy cartoons about people making themselves look ridiculous but thinking they look cool. Not that this guy is doing that and not that we don’t all do that to some degree. Here’s a picture of me in high school, when I thought I looked super cool.

I don’t know what this cartoon with the apartment-hunting iguana is about. I just thought it was amusing and I felt like drawing an iguana. I nearly got an iguana as a pet back in the 90s, almost entirely just so I could name it “Fluffy”.

Here in Southern California, we have a chain of discount liquor stores called BevMo. I shop there regularly and enjoy it but I made the mistake of giving them my email address and now I get emails two or three times a week reminding me to buy more booze. This also happens with CVS, a drug store chain. No wonder this country has a drug and alcohol problem.

A reader very helpfully reminded me via a FB comment or something that slugs are hermaphroditic and so are neither “he” nor “she”. Another told me that snails don’t actually travel as slowly as I depicted here. Gee, thanks. Does anyone care to remind me that gastropods don’t wear hats?

Our dog ran away from home this week. Olive Oyl and I stepped out for one hour and when we returned, Jemima was gone from our backyard. We have a tall, wooden fence with two gates and both were still closed and latched. We were dumbfounded about how she got out and worried sick, and, to make matters worse, because she had been given a bath that morning before we left, she was not wearing her collar. We got in our cars and trolled the neighborhood hoping to spot her. We made posters and plastered them at intersections. We did some stuff online at various lost pet sites. It was a sad afternoon and evening and neither of us slept well that night. The next morning, still laboring under a dark cloud, we checked the local shelters’ websites and spotted her mugshot at the local Humane Society. Eureka! She had a hangover and a bad tattoo but other than that, she seemed fine. We had them give her an electronic chip in case something like this happens again and we’re never going to take her collar off again. We also fitted her with a helmet with a GoPro camera on it so we can find out how she got out of our yard if she manages another escape.

Last thing: some friends celebrated their 33rd wedding anniversary last week and the female half commissioned me to do a cartoon as a gift to her hubby. They (and I) were all raised Catholic and got to joking recently how since the communion wafer is supposed to be the “body of Christ,” would vegans allow themselves to eat it? She asked for a cartoon about it so I came up with this one. I think it’s pretty funny but it might be problematic to publish it in the papers as a Bizarro cartoon, so I’ll share it with you here.

That’s it for this week, Jazz Pickles. As newspaper readership shrinks and more people read my work online for free, I deeply appreciate you folks who have made one-time donations or set up a small monthly patronage to keep me going. If you’d like to help me and Olive Oyl continue to afford poster board and markers for our Lost Dog signs, please do so by clicking Bunny and the “Tip Jar” logo in the margin of this blog! Or click here!

Most comedy clubs have amateur nights of some sort––which they now usually call “Open Mic Night”–– but in this case, even the audience is full of amateurs. More advanced comics readers will also notice that even the spotlight isn’t sure what its job is. I’ve done a fair amount of stand-up comedy in my day and I highly recommend it to anyone who has ever been curious about it; making a roomful of strangers laugh is even easier than it looks and not scary at all. Unless you have any fear of standing under a bright light in public and experiencing the deafening silence of complete and utter rejection.

Last week’s cartoons looked almost exactly like the following:

I like this “know-it-all, loudmouth jackass” cartoon a lot. Being a male and therefore full of testosterone, my first inclination when faced with a complete jerk is to punch him in the mouth. Being 5’7″ tall and under 150 lbs., I have learned to override that desire almost instantaneously. On a side note, a reader suggested this would have been even more perfect if they guy was talking on a cell phone. SO right. Wish I’d thought of that.

People are always looking for an easy way to lose weight without doing any work, so I created this “armchair diet.” It still has some bugs to work out.

Lots of people were confused by this joke about the buffalo in a bar. As far as I can tell there were two main reasons: they didn’t know who “Cody” was referring to, or they didn’t know who the bartender was talking to. Cody was the last name of Buffalo Bill Cody, a famous buffalo hunter in the Old West, and the bartender is talking to the buffalo (more correctly called an American Bison but then we call pre-European natives “Indians” when they’re not from India, so why get all pedantic now?) I confess that in the cartoon that was published in the paper and on websites, the eye of the bartender was drawn in a way that you could not clearly tell who he was looking at, so I suspect many readers assumed he was talking to the man on the left, which would be confusing. I fixed the eye for this post so there’s less doubt.

I can understand people who hunt animals for food but I have no sympathy for those who trophy hunt. Yes, your weapon is more powerful than an unarmed creature. Congratulations.

Don’t get me started on the way I feel about marijuana laws. Too late, I already did it by publishing this cartoon. The idea for this gag was sent to me by my Canadian friend, Russell Barth, a well-known activist for changing our absurd and inaccurate attitudes toward the cannabis plant. It has been shown time and time again to be tremendously safe and effective in a wide variety of medical uses, and utterly harmless in recreational use, especially as compared to tobacco, alcohol, and any number of prescription drugs. The absurd propaganda we’ve received about it in the last 100 years is finally beginning to be replaced by the truth and local governments are dropping their expensive and pointless prosecution of users, growers and sellers. I pray the U.S. federal government comes to its senses soon, as I’d like to live in a country that treats its adults like grown-ups. Wouldn’t you?

I was wondering one day about the effect of Batman on criminals of the Old West and it made me laugh hard enough to drop my bagful of money as I ran from the bank, so I drew this cartoon.

One last thing before I go: My two average daughters (see below) have started a fun little online store thatI’d love for you to check out. They’re hardworking gals who are not rich (and neither is their dad so he can’t help them out as much as he’d like) so feel good about tossing them a buck or two. And while you’re at it, like their Facebook page. For some reason, that seems to be important to people their age. Thanks, Jazz Pickles!

Today’s cartoon is the unfortunate result of the Dynamic Duo doing too good of a job cleaning up Gotham City. But on the bright side, who doesn’t enjoy roasted marshmallows?

I was a huge Batman fan as a kid, which is why this gag suggestion from Jazz Pickle, Ralph Ray appealed to me. I have to admit that I really had a ball drawing the original TV Batmobile from the 60s here. I had numerous models of this car when I was a kid and always wanted to have one when I grew up. I may still do that if I ever grow up.

I also enjoyed creating Pie Repair Man for the title panel. This is just for my Jazz Pickles, of course. No one else will have any idea what it is. Also don’t miss the box and marshmallow labels. Batman’s a bit OCD, as we all know.

It’s been a busy week at Rancho Bizarro and I didn’t even fully realize I hadn’t posted any cartoons since last Sunday until this morning. Crazy, daddio. I’m still working as the host/narrator of FOX TV’s Utopia, which has kept me pretty busy. I don’t know how long the gig will last but it sure has been fun to work on. It’s already led to other opportunities, which is terrific. One notable one is that the Coen brothers are planning a live-action version of Snow White and I’m being seriously considered for the role of Creepy, an eighth dwarf they added specifically for me. Wish me luck!

This week’s cartoons went like this…

Monday: Seriously, why do superheroes need to have secret identities and ridiculous costumes? I suspect this will remain a mystery of our civilization for centuries to come.

Tuesday: Seriously, how many eggs can one small, red bird lay? Come on!

Wednesday: Seriously, how weird is it that a caterpillar can turn into a butterfly? Is this biological metamorphosis meant to inspire us to quit our jobs at the grocery store and become astronauts? Because that’s what it did for me. (Still looking for an astronaut program that will accept me, but I’m hopeful.)

Thursday: Seriously, we pay money for a bloody body chunk of some dead thing but the presence of a single hair ruins it. Really?

Friday: I grew up with three sisters and a mother, had two daughters of my own, and have had numerous girlfriends and wives. PMS symptoms varied with all of them, of course, but I know of what I speak. Seriously.

Saturday: Seriously, most decent men will let a woman cry on our shoulder but none of us are particularly fond of it. If you’re a man with large, absorbent shoulders, you may want to consider offering this service. I suspect it represents a significant market opportunity. Also, I misspelled “absorbent” in the strip version of this cartoon but my editor didn’t catch it. I may need to cry on her shoulder.

I’ve done a few Batman cartoons wherein I riff on the animal choices for he and Robin’s alter-egos. This suggestion, however, came from my good friend and colleague in cartooning, Dan McConnell. (I’ve asked Dan to double all of the consonants in his first and last name, but he resists.) You can see his original suggestion for this comic here.

I thought this was a fun way to comment on the recent phenomenon of people being on their smart phones all of the time instead of being present. I was happy to find a way to do it without showing a lot of people on smart phones.

There is mounting evidence that birds have better memories than we have given them credit for. I have no doubt they recognize “easy marks” from past experiences. I used to feed a flock of pigeons on the roof of my building in Manhattan years ago and a couple of them would recognize me on the very crowded streets of my neighborhood (9 stories below) and pester me for food.

BIZARRO BASEMENT: Here’s a weird cartoon of mine from 1998. It’s one of those that isn’t immediately apparent until closer inspection. At least, that was my intent.